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U.S. President-elect Barack Obama named more scientists to top posts over the weekend: Harold Varmus and Eric Lander will serve as co-chairs of the president's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, headed up by Harvard physicist John Holdren.
Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist and former head of the AAAS, will also lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
These scientists are no strangers to our pages: Two years ago, Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan Ketterin

President-elect Barack Obama plans to nominate Harvard physicist John Holdren for role of presidential science advisor, according to Science's blog linkurl:ScienceInsider.;http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/
linkurl:Holdren;http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/john-holdren is the director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is also a professor of environmental science and public policy. His re

We at __The Scientist__ are all a-flitter because we're now on Twitter. Starting this week, you can sign up to receive our "tweets" at twitter.com/TheScientistLLC.
Twitter is a simple messaging service that allows users to share brief text updates -- otherwise known as tweets -- of up to 140 characters. (The last sentence was exactly 140 characters.) Readers can receive Twitter posts on the Web, on their mobile phones, via instant messaging, RSS feeds, Facebook, and various Twitter-dedicated ap

A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct.
The website -- called linkurl:Scientific Red Cards;http://www.scientificredcards.org/ -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim.
The database might also prevent resear

Another case of a potentially fatal brain infection has been reported in a patient taking the multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri, the biotech who developed the drug announced yesterday.
This is the fourth case of infection, called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) this year. They are the only cases reported since the drug was taken off the market in 2005 because of three cases of infection. The FDA allowed Tysabri back on the market in 2006 with restrictions and stronger warnings.

Six California stem cell biotech companies received more than $5 million in funding last week from the state's stem cell funding body -- the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), according to a linkurl:news release ;http://www.cirm.ca.gov/pdf/ICOC_121008.pdf from the agency.
The money represents the first major pay out to companies from the state's $3 billion research enterprise. Until now, only Novocell Inc. had received a small grant of $50,000.
The grants are part of 23 gr

D. Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist and anthropologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for his work on the infectious brain agents now known as prions, died last Friday (Dec. 12) in Tromso, Norway. He was 85.
"He was a genius," linkurl:Robert Klitzman,;http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/bec/staff/klitzman.html a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York and Gajdusek's biographer, told __The Scientist__. "His brain was faster and at a higher level than anyone I've ever met."
In the 1950s, link

Two employees in the pediatric neurological research department at Columbia University were arrested Wednesday (December 10) for scamming the institution out of more than $200,000.
John Bzdil, the former manager of the pediatric neurosciences department at the university's Neurological Institute, and his wife, Heather Rinehart, will be presented with charges today (Dec 12) of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, a press officer from the US Attorney's office, Southern D

University College London is offering new unorthodox research grants for its staff without peer review, deadlines, directives, or milestones.
The funding, which is open to any UCL employee, is in in the ballpark of £100,000 ($150,000) per year for at least three years for each awardee, according to UCL visiting earth sciences professor linkurl:Don Braben,;http://www.braben.com/VentureResearch/DB.html the scheme's brainchild and the founder of Venture Research International, a company that

Officials have halted enrollment in more than 600 human research studies taking place in Seattle this week after a federal audit found shoddy paperwork in some consent forms.
The Department of Veterans Affair's linkurl:Office of Research Oversight;http://www1.va.gov/oro/ determined in a November audit that the linkurl:VA Puget Sound Health Care System;http://www1.va.gov/pugetsound/ should be more careful in documenting that human subjects are competent enough to make reasoned informed consent.